Flickr unveils ‘Photo Session’ feature and Android app

By Trevor Mogg September 28, 2011

Photo-sharing service Flickr unveiled Photo Session and the Flickr Android app on Thursday.

Photo Session is a feature designed to encourage friends and family to share photos at the same time, no matter where they are in the world.

Say you’ve taken a thousand photos on your recent trip to Vietnam and you want to share them with relatives and friends at the same time. Well, the first thing to do is edit them down to the best 50, because you can bet your bottom dollar not one of them will want to sit through a slideshow that goes well into the night, no matter how good the pics are.

Once you’ve picked out the best, set up a Photo Session and then invite whoever you like to browse the photos at exactly the same time.

“When you move to the next photo it moves for everyone else too,” Flickr’s Zack Sheppard wrote in a post on the website’s blog.

The fun part is that while you’re viewing the photos, you can all chat with each other and even draw on the pictures using the built-in tools. Up to 10 others can join in the communal global slideshow, and it can be viewed on a PC, iPhone and iPad.

Flickr also launched its official Android app on Thursday. It’s been a while coming, considering that the iPhone version has been around for over two years. The app enables users to take pics, jazz them up with filters, and easily post them to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

“Browsing and navigating has been custom designed for Flickr to make use of maps, tags, and activity around your photos,” Sheppard explained. “You can stay up to date with the latest comments and activity on your photos and take advantage of gorgeous full screen browsing and slideshows.”

There had been some fears that, with Flickr-owner Yahoo going through something of a turbulent time recently, the photo-sharing site could suffer. However, these latest additions show that, at least for now, Yahoo is keen to see the Flickrverse further evolve.

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